There are a few ways to investigate, but for that we would need a bit more info. Firstly, what distro do you use ? Try using a different bootloader than GRUB to see if it solves the issue. Otherwise you could also try to use Linux’s UEFI stub.
One that I can remember many years ago, classic trying to do something on a flash drive and dd my main hdd instead.
Funny thing, since this was a 5400rpm and noticed relatively quick (say 1-2 minutes), I could ctrl-c the dd, make a backup of most of my personal files (being very careful not to reboot) and after that I could safely reformat and reinstall.
To this day it amazes me how linux managed to not crash with a half broken root file system (I mean, sure, things were crashing right and left, but given the situation, having enough to back up most things was like magic)
Many years ago I was dual booting Linux and Windows XP. I was having issues with the Linux install, and decided to just reinstall. It wasn’t giving me the option to reinstall fresh, only to modify the existing install.
So I had the bright idea to just rm -rf /
Surely it’ll let me do a fresh Linux install then.
Immediately after hitting enter I realized that my Windows partitions would be mounted. I did clearly the only sensible thing and pulled the plug.
I think I recovered all of my files. Kind of. I only lost all the file paths and file names. There was plenty to recover if I just sorted though 00000000.file, 00000001.file, 00000002.file, etc. Was 00000004.file going to be a Word document or a binary from system32 directory? Your guess is as good as mine!
I tried some distros but always went back to Ubuntu and then I settled there. Until like 3 days ago. I installed Parch (basically Arch with a GUI installer) and I think I will stay for the AUR.
That’s the beauty of Linux! If you feel adventurous, you always easily find something to tweak/experiment. Since I moved to Linux my mindset and workflow never ceased to evolve. That’s because I’m curious but that couldn’t be possible in any other OS. Only Linux can offer so much options and an exceptional level of granularity so anyone can build his/herown perfect system. We may achieve the same thing but in different ways and we’ll both run Linux.
If you’re more shy you can simply install a set of software under a given distro and you’re done. This is also a Linux option. Right now, I couldn’t find any challenges to keep me busy for more than a day or two until I decided to test a new system (NixOS) in a virtual machine. This is another way to have the kind of fun you mention :)
I love tweaking and improving my system so much that I dedicated my little blog only to that. Sharing is another crucial principles I love in the Linux philosophy.
I tried Arch in a VM about when Archinstall came out. And after the first install, I did it again with archinstall | lolcat. The configuration part was a little buggy, but let me tell you; it was worth it.
I used to spend an unhealthy amount of hours customizing my desktop (Plasma) just to distrohop and repeat that cycle one million times. Then I just got used to the vanilla state of Plasma, and now I really don’t care about that at all.
For people that still care and distrohop, there’s a tool called “konsave” which allows you to save, restore and export specific Plasma customizations (settings included). You only have to reinstall themes you had to install as a package/compiled it.
I don’t run Linux (though I’m admittedly more interested in it than I used to be) but the reddit API stuff definitely made me learn more about foss, and value it more.
I do value FOSS sodtware and like linux for it being foss(there are many other reasons too though). I do think understanding importance of Free software is much important than admiring one of the(most important) free software projects. I can see yku usibg linux soon or later in the future, along with other free programs
I think maybe I’m misunderstanding—are you saying that valuing free software is more important than valuing FOSS? FOSS is inherently free, no? Free Open Source Software. I would understand if I was talking about open source in general, but FOSS does include being free. Maybe that’s not what you meant.
Interesting to know that steam, gog, and epic (specifically) all work well for you, I’ve heard mixed results with Epic, some say it doesn’t work. Maybe I’ve gotten wrong info.
I have an older laptop, and as soon as I can upgrade to something better, I’m going to use it as a Linux practice.
I am using heroic launcher to play blazing sails on epic right now. I am on Arch, which I believe is a positive since the steam deck is arch based (i heard).
The escapist 2 i have not gotten to work properly though. It runs but with like 1fps. Apparently this is because epics implementation and it runs smooth with steam. Definitely test things on a game by game basis.
which is why I like to add a set -u at the begining of a script.
The second one is not with a Linux box but a mainframe running AIX:
If on Linux killall java kills all java processes, on AIX it just ignore the arguments and kill all processes that the user can kill. Adios the CICS region 😬 (on the test env. thankfully)
On a real UNIX (not only AiX) killall is part of the shutdown process - it gets called by init at that stage when you want to kill everything left before reboot/shutdown.
Linux is pretty unique in using that for something else.
killall typically sends SIGTERM by default. It accepts a single argument, the signal to send - so shutdown would call it once with SIGTERM, then with SIGKILL. killall is not meant to to be called interactively - which worked fine, until people who had their first contact with UNIX like systems on Linux started getting access to traditional UNIX systems.
It used to be common to discourage new Linux users from using killall interactively for exactly that reason. Just checked, there’s even a warning about that in the killall manpage on Linux.
I’m in the process of switching my main server over from windows to Linux
I went with Deb 12 and it all works smoothly but I don’t have enough room to back up data to change the drive formats so they’re still NTFS. I was looking at my main media HDD and thought “oh, I’ll at least delete those windows partitions and leave the main partition intact.”
I found out the hard way that NTFS partitions can’t just reclaim space like that. It shuffles all the data when you change the partition. It’s currently 23 hours into the job and it’s 33% done.
I did this to reclaim 30 MB of space on a 14 TB drive.
You mean you’ve removed the service partitions used by windows and grown the main one into the freed space? Than yes, it’s not the way. 'Cause creating a new partition instead of growing the existing one shouldn’t have touched the latter at all :/
Tinkering is all fun and games, until it’s 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you’re about to execute… And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: “damn, what did I expect to happen?”.
Nah, that’s when the fun really starts! ;)
The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect… So, I installed glibc from Debian’s repos.
:D That one is a classic. Most distributions don’t include packagers from other distros because 99% of the time it’s a bad idea. But with Arch you can do whatever you want, of course
My two things:
I’ve heard about some new coreutils (rm, cp, cat… this time the name really fits the contents :D) and I decided to test it out. Of course it was conflicting with my current coreutils package and I couldn’t just replace it because deleting the old package would break requirements. So without thinking I forced the package manager to delete it “I’ll install a new one in just a second”. Turns out it’s hard to install a package without cp, etc :D
I don’t remember what I was doing but I overwrote the first bytes of hdd. Meaning my partition table disappeared. Nothing could be mounted, no partitions found. Seemingly a brick.
Turns out, if you run a rescue iso, ask it to try and recognize partitions and recreate the table without formatting, Linux will come back to life as if nothing happened
The only difference is Distrobox is more agnostic and will create .desktop files for containers and applications installed in them automatically. Toolbx you need to make the .desktop manually.
Use whatever you are comfortable with and works for you. At the moment it sounds like Windows might be the path of least resistance. Fine, go with that.
For me, I finally ditched Windows altogether around 15 years ago. Well, I say ditched - my customers and staff … haven’t.
The list of stuff you have problems with might be tricky on Linux simply because the vendors of music gear are unlikely to give a shit. Nvidia should be fine. I have a VMware VM at home which runs Zoneminder on Ubuntu, with a passed through Nvidia GPU. Surely it should be easier on physical hardware. I wrote this: wiki.zoneminder.com/GPU_passthrough_in_VMWare
You mention gaming so you’ll probably not be bothered with CUDA. You’ll need wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA If that doesn’t do it for you, hit the Arch forums …
The forums can be a bit intimidating but if you keep your query concise and show some evidence of effort, someone will probably get you over the line.
I definitely appreciate your response. I truly want to ditch windows, it would be easy without my music hardware though a VM with USB passthrough may be the ticket. The issues I had with Arch and my 3090 were really with trying to go the wayland route. Though that was over a year ago I gave that a shot. I could try again, but since then I have gotten more familiarized with running arch on other systems. I have tried many other distros, and none quite catch me quite like arch.
For my server I have already ditched windows, and went with a ubuntu server. Though I will be changing distros to something else due to differences in opinion with the way Ubuntu and Canonical conduct themselves. I would still rather see people use Ubuntu over windows, but that’s not much of a bar to pass.
I may eventually check the forums if this time doesn’t pan out with using arch on my main rig.
The logical replacement for Ubuntu is probably Debian. I have quite a lot of Ubuntu servers at work. I am quite seriously considering going upstream. I do like the LTS to LTS promise and that fits well for my customers who like to see enterprisey features without going RedHat or Oracle. You may not have had to deal with “enterprise grade” stuff which loosely translates to bloody expensive and often horrible.
I’m an Arch fan too - actually I’m a Linux fan. I used to do Gentoo (10+ years) but I got tired of my lap overheating. Before that Slackware, Mandrake (Mandriva), RH, Yggdrassil oh and a fair bit of SuSE, not to mention everything Novell did since NetWare 3.1. Whoops, sorry, mind wandering 8)
Wayland and Pipewire will probably do everything eventually but for now, you have functionality gaps. Pipewire is quite amazing and being developed at nearly indecent haste. It might be worth diving in to their community. At worst you will find a lot of like minded people to you.
I haven’t exactly decided on what distro for my server, but I have used forks/offshoots of debian, namely Raspbian or Raspberry Pi OS for my Pis. I understand the hurdles and such that come along with enterprise related products, as I am an IT professional by trade. I haven’t worked with RHEL or Oracle’s offerings yet.
I love Arch, but I too love linux. I never got into Gentoo, but I wanted to try it out just for the experience. I do get annoyed with having to compile everything from source with Arch on my laptop for exactly that reason; lap overheating. I also haven’t used Slackware, Mandrak/Mandriva, Tggdrassil, or SuSE but I have at least heard of them. And I absolutely love the conversation, mind wandering is alright by me!
The tough pill to swallow with linux for me has been the functionality gaps between different offerings, but I love the choices I am given.
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